Dodge gets bumped from NASCAR, turns right: Motoramic Dash

"Rubbin', son, is racing," says Robert Duvall in "Days of Thunder," and no team has felt that more than Dodge, which had to snuff out its NASCAR team on Tuesday after it lost Roger Penske's team to Ford. It's a blow to the corporate ego, it's a disappointment to race fans, and it may be the best thing to happen to the company in years.

Since its return to NASCAR in 2001, Dodge has been a mid-pack competitor to Chevy and Ford, winning races here and there but rarely in contention for the overall series championship. One big reason: Despite running dozens of cars in every race, NASCAR only has a handful of top-shelf, fully funded teams. When Ford picked off Penske, who built Dodge's engines for all its entries, the Chrysler motorsports executives were left with unpleasant choices: either launch their own engine-building service, try to fund another high-quality team, or struggle through with underfunded teams.

Ralph Gilles, the head of Chrysler's SRT division, said Tuesday the company "couldn't go forward with a structure that met our standards." Dodge will finish out the 2012 season, but its departure leaves just Chevy, Ford and Toyota in NASCAR -- or to be more accurate, three types of decals applied to identical frames powering cars with nothing in common to the cars those automakers build. And that's where Chrysler's real opportunity lies.

Last weekend, the first race version of the new SRT Viper ran in the American LeMans Series at Mid-Ohio. Dodge has Travis Pastrana competing the new Dodge Dart in Global RallyCross. Both draw a tiny fraction of the attention of NASCAR, but are far more authentic. The link between racing on Sundays and selling on Mondays isn't as strong as NASCAR would prefer, and Dodge may lose a few fans over its departure. But if it puts the resources into the right place, it could find a newer audience interested in cars that they can actually buy.

Other news from around the industry this morning:

GM whistleblower said to bring down marketing chief: Bloomberg's Tim Higgins and Jeff Green get the clearest picture yet of why General Motors marketing chief Joel Ewanick was defenestrated weeks ago, reporting he had hid some of the cost of a sponsorship deal with Manchester United among several budgets to keep its total figure from superiors. If true, it's a breach of GM protocol all right, just like it was when Cadillac's leaders hid the cost of building the first prototypes of what would become the CTS. Perhaps the stranger detail was that GM Chief Executive Daniel Akerson had made Ewanick carry around a "Farley" award -- named after Ford rival Jim Farley -- for cursing in public. Akerson is a former Navy officer; do sailors not curse anymore? (Bloomberg)

Shortage of skilled workers is a myth: Every time some company hiring officer wails about not being able to find enough people to fill jobs, someone should send them this story. Yes, it's hard to fill jobs when wages haven't risen in years, on-the-job training has disappeared and corporations now push 26 percent of their work force into contract jobs that offer few if any benefits. (Detroit Free Press)

Car sales expected to keep rising: Sort of. Economists expect the industry to sell 14 million vehicles this year; what happens next depends on how optimistic you are about the next four years. (Detroit News)